Name: Ardy
Piece/Story: Soul in Flight/Blood Saint
Colors: Bone 1 (corpse road); Surgical Steel 2 (transplant); Fire Opal 3 (impassioned)
Styles/Supplies: Graffiti (Bone, Surgical Steel, and Fire Opal for Summer of Whump); Photography
Word Count: 965
Ratings/Warnings: PG - discussion of metaphoric death; No standard warnings apply
Notes: There are vampires in the next chapter. And actual vampire action in like... a few chapters.

At 5 o’clock, I began speedily packing duffel bags, knowing slowing my pace would give the argumentative part of my brain time to catch on and set me back to waffling.

By 8.30, I sat in front of a giant plate of waffles, with a map, highlighter, and months old handwritten directions from Luke.

I drove out of town with none of the glory of a Western hero, just the defeat of his fallen enemy. It struck me as mightily unfair, given that my conqueror was a sniveling coward himself, hiding somewhere deep in my DNA.

The Illinois plains gave me no comforting embrace there across the Wabash, only stretched out for long rolling miles, farmland and deltas rendered impersonably vast and flat. A vault of stars shone down with ancient, silent tales recorded in glyphic constellations. Dotted at random intervals across the landscape, their electric children messily imitated them, with the single, lonesome lamps of farmhouses and the chaotically clustered blazes of sleepy little towns beaconing human civilization.

Somewhere outside of Cairo, my station went broken and staticky, so I flicked away from Top 40 pop to country. The music stayed slow and twangy with a nearly unbroken soundtrack between my driving and too-numerous stops to rest my tired form. It played over the rumble of idling semitrucks at highway rest stops; accompanied the garish, buzzing lights of empty gas stations run by gum-popping young women named Tammy or Shelley; and filled 24 hour diners where the headwaitress was always an aging peroxide blonde beauty queen and the cook was her husband, Earl.

Traveling at night is the best sideshow America has to offer. It is medicine for the very soul, something soothing and unsettling at once. Everyone who is out this time of night has a purpose, and a story, and a strong sense of self-possession. They are not the wanderers here to kill time, but the warriors that slay mile-markers. They are not the tourists gawking around the exhibits, but the regulars who work the stages. And knowing they are regulars among regulars, they become open, transparent, and unapologetic. It’s easy to find normalcy among them, because they carry no pretension of belief some standard exists for it. There is no laud to be had, there is no status to woo the spotlight with, and so there is no need to front. This is their own twilight kingdom, and they pass through it peaceably, with as much concern for the perceptions of strangers as the dead have for the sensibilities of the living who have invaded their midnight crossroads.

This was what passed through my mind as my heart was warmed by Norma Jean’s secret-recipe-corn-chowder and Peggy Lou’s from-scratch-fruit-pie-a-la-mode. These were the firm moments of meditation that clicked by like prayer beads, and would have kept uninterrupted vigil with me except for one moving, reverent moment that fell in the middle of my course and came to symbolize my whole trip.

Silencing the radio, I nearly held my breath on the Mississippi bridge. It was like crossing the Styx, the Jordan--whatever name that blessed waterway separating this life from the silver shore of the next one goes by for you. The strong metal and concrete frame rose out of the gathered mist. I rolled down my windows to catch the distant sound of water and a solitary boat. When I pass, may God our Creator not take me home to Grandfather Sky, but may he let me wander this river for eternity--this liminal space that separates East from West, this mighty Leviathan snaking its way down to the Gulf of Mexico, this artery for the transport of supply, story, and song. Here I was between worlds, in no world, in the river’s own world, passing over the bridge it allowed us to span it with.

There is something beautiful about traveling at night. Something holy about fleeing under cover of darkness from the spirits of depression and misery. Especially when you know there’s a soft bed and a pan of cornbread waiting for you at the end.

I missed my junction for 62, but managed to pick it up in Walnut Ridge. Up into the Ozarks I climbed, beginning to see a break on the horizon going into Ash Flat. From there, it was a roller coaster ride of rickety mountain roads smothered in thick soup-like fog up into hilltops glistening with dew and blinding with first light. Somewhere around Yellville, I chucked the map. Luke’s directions were taped to the dash, but I found the turn-off purely by feel and emotional memory.

Red sun greeted me, then played among the trees as I cruised up the clay drive with gravel too sunk in it for traction. The clearing ahead held an ancient pink fieldstone and clapboard inn, with a faded painted sign where only a fancifully painted green and white “Hotel” was still readable. There was even the quaint site of two fire pits of to the side, still sooty with the ashes of last night’s festivities. A wavering smile tremored across my face and I didn’t even bother to pull in behind the family pick up truck parked by the staff entrance. Instead, I threw myself over the steering wheel of my rusted Chevy, strength utterly gone and voice wracked with low-whining sobs.

I had died sometime long ago, and it had taken my soul this long to finally make the journey from my prolonged funeral to my burial back up here in the hills. This honestly caused more relief than sadness. Part of me still wishes the world had let me stay dead, just to see how far down I could have put these new roots, so far away from my old life.